Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

6.00am

After the afterbirth
a rain of blows.

Punch drunk with love
I feel your first space close

and through clenched teeth
taste salt. Days before
milk comes down like tears

and here, in the hiatus
between birth and understanding,
you sleep off your first fight

eyes swollen shut
your ears stuck back where blood
dries in your hair.

Everywhere the tiny sounds
of radios and accents.
I shrink, fix on the inside

of the curtains, their pallid
flowers evolving into parrots
into pirates into birds of paradise.

My boys play tug-of-war,
my boys play battle. My daughter,
wrapped in a rough towel,

you’re oblivious to the world outside
where men rebuild
into a bright blue sky.

1.00pm

Florence, you are born.
That innocent plane is sending you a message –
a morse of harmless dashes.

Here along the corridor
we mothers watch the News,
our babies laid across deflating bellies.

We’re warned that soon more buildings
might be buckled at the knees.
We’re told to drink the water confidently.

Yet, heavy with postpartum flesh,
we smile, return to bed, unbalanced by our
loss of weight and still not light.

We turn our heads from the metal voice
addressing the empty dayroom,
its threat anathema to dozing women

whose eyes are closing
with each toothless pull, which lulls us
as it draws the hind milk down.

10.00pm

The Arctic Shelf is disappearing
under warming water.
Your children may not see penguins,
my sleeping newborn daughter.

The population of the western
world is getting fatter,
though fruit tastes only of the sky
it had to cross to get here.

A flat along the route your father
takes to work each day
turns out to house a cell who run
a small bomb factory

and I’m waiting for your hungry cry
to start, your eyes to focus,
and I will hold your gaze until
the world blurs all around us.